Don’t wait up Tuesday night

Want to know who will win the California primary? You’ll probably be waiting until Wednesday morning — and maybe longer.

“The East Coast is going to tune in the next morning and we are still going to be counting,” said Stephen Weir, the president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials and the top election official in Contra Costa County.

You can blame the delay on several factors: High turnout, for one. Or Secretary of State Debra Bowen’s decision to require almost two dozen counties to shelve their electronic voting machines and use paper ballots instead.

Voters may also be to blame: Many are holding onto to their mail-in ballots until the last minute. Election workers have to compare their signatures on the ballot to their voter registration cards, a time-consuming process.

Weir, who’s been talking to election officials across the state, offers this guide for political junkies on when election results will roll in:

— 8 p.m. Tuesday: After the polls close, all 58 counties will start to report the results of the mail-in ballots that have been received and counted over the last month. Weir expects about 3 million votes to be reported. (Overall he’s predicting 56 percent of the state’s 15.7 millions voters will cast ballots.)

— 8:30 p.m.: County registrars will post results from small precincts of less than 250 voters, which are required to vote by mail. These precincts represent about 2.5 percent of the state’s electorate, or 380,000 voters.

— 8:30-11:30 p.m.: Results from Tuesday’s voting will trickle in, with counties with smaller populations reporting first. The pace of reporting usually picks up speed at around 10:30 p.m. Counties are required to send results to to the Secretary of State’s office every two hours.

— 11:30 p.m. to 2 a.m. Wednesday: Weir expects much of Northern California to have reported results from the precincts. But there will be some big exceptions: Sacramento County, because of problems with equipment that counts votes in the field, will bring all the ballots to be counted in the central office, which could delay results between 6 a.m and 9 a.m.

— 4 a.m.: Los Angeles County — which accounts for 1 out of 4 votes in California — is expected to report all of its ballots cast in precincts.

— 6 a.m: Santa Clara County, slowed by having to count paper ballots, expects to have all its precinct votes counted.

— 8 a.m. to 10 a.m.: Riverside, San Diego and San Bernardino counties — which have been forced to shift away from their electronic voting machines — should have reported their precinct tallies, Weir said.

— Wildcard: In November 2006, there were nearly 2 million ballots that were not included in the election night totals — mostly mail-in ballots turned in the last day as well as provisional and damaged ballots. With turnout expected to be higher this year, Weir said, “We expect even more this time.” Those ballots, which could represent 20 to 25 percent of the vote, may take days or weeks to count.

“It’s that old adage, ‘You can have it fast and cheap, but not accurate,’ ” Weir said. “If you want it accurate, it’s not fast.”

But Bowen, whose decision to order paper ballots has been criticized by some county registrars, says she has no regrets about slowing the vote. “We don’t want to be in the Florida situation (in 2000), where the election was called, then uncalled, then recalled… Accuracy just has to come first.”

BTW, San Francisco County is hoping to have its precinct count finished by midnight, although we’ve heard that before…